Jacinta Richardson

Biography

Jacinta Richardson runs Perl Training Australia, a micro-business offering courses throughout Australia. Both as part of her job and a massive free-time sink, she is involved in running conferences (linux.conf.au 2007, Open Source Developers’ Conference (Australia) 2004-2008, Australian System Administrators Conference (SAGE-AU) 2008-2009), attending conferences, writing perl-tips, speaking at Perl Monger meetings whenever she’s in the right town, participating in on-line Perl forums and promoting women in IT. For her work in the Perl community, Jacinta was awarded the White Camel Award in 2008. When away from the computer, Jacinta enjoys scuba diving, cycling and baking.

Open Source Bridge 2012

Sessions for this user

Unicode isn’t new, but it still seems hard when your starting at the beginning and haven’t even been told the difference between a glyph, a codepoint, a character and a byte. Every year there are talks and tutorials at conferences about it, but if you haven’t grasped the basics, you can feel frustrated and lost much too quickly. This talk will cover the essentials of Unicode, locale and how they affect things like regular expressions, reading and writing files and sending data out to the world. Perl will be the programming language used to demonstrate these ideas, but much of the content should be accessible to all programmers.

Proposals for this user

Modern Perl is awesome. You can do amazing things and get stuff done with so much less code than before. You can turn this:
say join(" ", reverse(split(" ", $string)));
into
$string->split(" ")->reverse->join(" ")->say;
If you've ever written in Perl and found it not to your taste, or used to use Perl but now use something else, come to this talk to see if Perl in 2012 is something you can get excited about again.

You have a great business idea and your friends and colleagues are supportive and tell you that you can do it. The forms have been filled in, you've said goodbye to your rat-race job, and you're investing your energy into getting things done. Still, despite how compelling your idea is, you're not making any money and your savings are dwindling. What are you doing wrong? Come to this talk to find out a list of common small business mistakes.

Open Source Bridge 2011

Sessions for this user

What's going on in the mind of the user as they use your system? Did they choose it, or was it chosen for them? Do they like it or hate it? How can you tell? This talk discusses the types of users that exist, and their motivations.

Proposals for this user

Perl has come a very long way even in the last 6 years since Dr Conway's Perl Best Practices book was published. This talk will provide a lightning tour of the current status of Perl's best practices using many of the ideas from Modern Perl.

Master Foss said: “A man who mistakes secrets for knowledge is like a man who, seeking light, hugs a candle so closely that he smothers it and burns his hand.” This talk will cover koans for small, open source business enlightenment.